Thursday, May 17, 2018

In a NY Times piece about Gaza that has generated some
possibly useful controversy — "Falling for Hamas's Split-Screen
Fallacy" — Matti Friedman writes that "As is often the case where
Israel is concerned, things quickly became hysterical and divorced from the
events themselves" .

He writes: "Israeli soldiers facing Gaza have no good
choices. They can warn people off with tear gas or rubber bullets, which are
often inaccurate and ineffective, and if that doesn't work, they can use live
fire."

Fair enough. Did Israeli soldiers use tear gas? They did,
and it obviously failed to contain the protest. Did they then try rubber
bullets and discover them to be "inaccurate and ineffective?" Not
that I've read or heard. From what I can tell, the IDF went directly to live
fire with predictably ghastly results.

But wait: Friedman tells us that, "a Hamas leader,
Salah Bardawil, told a Hamas TV station that 50 of the dead were Hamas members.
The militant group Islamic Jihad claimed three others." And we, critical
readers all, not at subject in the least to hysteria where Israel is concerned,
don't stop to doubt the Hamas boast, do we? No, because if Hamas says it, it
must be true: everyone cut down by the IDF must be a shahid, a true Islamicist
martyr.

If you believe that, this bit of Hamas self-glorification,
than maybe you’d like to invest in this bridge I happen to know about. You
don't have to go to Gaza — who'd want to, right?— to get in on this offer; it's
right there, at the lower tip of Manhattan. A nice bridge.

. . .

. . .

My view is this:

1) recognize the perniciousness of Hamas

and

2) can still criticize Israel.

Amazing.

There are those on the Israel-bashing left (assuming it can
be called a left) who deny that there can be liberal Zionists. There is no room
for liberal Zionism in their anti-Zionist qua anti-Semitic worldview. For them,
Israel is so bad from the ground up that liberalism doesn't apply to it; Israel
can't be corrected or usefully critiqued, only, one way or another, torched and
reconstituted according to better —
internationalist? Leninist? — principles. You don't have to go far to find examples
of this. Dig just below the surface of JVP/BDS and you'll come on a raging source.

But it just ain't so. Like I said, I am a Zionist insofar as
I believe without reservation in the state of Israel. I am a liberal Zionist in
that I simultaneously believe that the country has deep flaws and I have the
right to point them out.

This liberalism of mine is portable. It's American
liberalism, to start with, and as critical of Trump and his gang of thieves, warmongers
and liars as it is of Netanyahu's brand of nationalists and theocrats.

But getting back to Gaza, it doesn't make me an
Israel-basher to say, after due consideration, that the use of live fire against
protesters in Gaza was brutal and unjustified, and gave Hamas all the deaths it
could now claim for itself, all the shahids, real or mostly bogus.

I bet a lot of the people out here who rush to the defense
of Israel are liberals/progressives in the American context. Trump disgusts
them. But somehow Netanyahu doesn't.

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

In a NY Times piece about the turmoil and slaughter at the
Gaza Border there was a bit about a Palestinian boy brandishing what he
regarded as a precious trophy, a snippet of the barbed wire fence dividing him
and his kind from Israel. He risked his life to get it, and was a fool for
doing so. Gazans like him and his family are never getting back land they
imagine was theirs in Jaffa, Jerusalem, or Tel Aviv. Hamas has misled him and
others like him to fantasize otherwise and yet I think beyond child's play
there some element of heroism in his action.

At any rate I feel more for him than I do for the Israeli
sharpshooters looking down from wooden towers — have you seen these structures?
the stuff of Star Wars, Mordor, Avatar — on Palestinians of all ages doing
their deluded do-si-do with the border. These Palestinians are really no threat
to crash that border and march on Eretz Yisrael, no threat to occupy even an
inch of land. They have burning kites and burning tires, sometimes Molotov
cocktails. And yet the IDF treats them as existential threats, as the overused
saying goes, as if they were they vanguard of some mighty revanchist army that about
materialize out of Arab sands at any time.

. . .

How sick of Hamas to send helpless desperate believers to
confront awesome military might.

How sick the IDF to shoot down from towers with live fire
instead of rubber bullets.

Israel sharpshooters shot low, it's true, breaking legs,
incurring crippling, maiming, amputation. They are sharpshooters; they aim. Would
someone tell me how rubber bullets below the knee would not have more than sufficed
to neutralize the advance of the dread phantasmagorical Gazan army?

. . .

Israel disgusts me.

Not only vis a vis Gaza, though that would be enough, but
also vis a vis Jerusalem, and how on the very day on which Palestinians mark Nakba,
Trumpenyahu commemorated American official recognition of Jerusalem as capital
of the Jewish State, thereby putting an end to all hopes that Jerusalem might
also serve, as capital of a Palestinian entity.

How viciously provocative, on Nakba day.

But then there's the gargoyle nonsense of the commemoration,
which featured a Christian pastor who has declared that "Mormonism, Islam,
Judaism, Hinduism" lead people "to an eternity of separation from God
in Hell," and a concluding benediction by an another pastor noted for
saying "Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews to their ancestral homeland."

Israel disgusts me, and its theocracy. So too the United
States, and its, our, theocracy light.

Sometimes political reality leaves little space to breathe.

I know how that little Palestinian kid felt with a bit of Gaza
wire in his hand. And that he had no idea of the shit he was getting into.

Thursday, May 10, 2018

How disappointing that the opposition — the "resistance"
— did next to nothing to oppose or resist Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear
treaty with Iran.

Nothing about the withdrawal was a surprise. Trump kept
promising to do it. And given his manifold failures — to fully eviscerate
Obamacare, to get Mexico to splurge for a wall, to bring back coal etc. — it
seemed increasingly likely he would follow through on this particular boast: this
was the one big campaign pledge entirely within his power to fulfill, so he did.

Seems to me those of us who might have mounted or called for
at least a semblance of opposition, and I do not exclude myself, were bent over
with concerns about burnishing our critiques, fussing over just the right
historic parallels to bring up and the most acerbic phrases to use in describing
the nouveau conditions of the Trump presidency — that of President Horribilis.

It was, I felt often, as if there was some unannounced Grand
Prize for coming up with the best rhetorical flourish, the most thunderous damnation.

But while we were thundering, flourishing and damming, Trump,
by annulling the American stake in the Iran deal, has very simply moved the
United States, the Middle East, the world, close to a big war.

Sometimes, seems to me, the most politically astute among us
are blinded by our astuteness.

And I'm not in the least confident that we of the
resistance, of the opposition, have any idea of how to resist or oppose this
war, which is already coming at us in bits and pieces.

Sunday, May 6, 2018

When you disregard or insult Jews enough — as Jeremy Corbyn
has done by calling Hamas and Hezbollah great friends of the left, or at least
his version of it — not only do you betray a blinkered view of the world but
you in effect dare Jews to do something about it. I mean, what can Jews do,
cause they need the left, right?

Or maybe not.

And so, in the spirit of "If you prick us, do we not
bleed?", London Jews have pricked back. They voted Labor out in seats long
regarded as Labor sinecures.

Lest this be construed as yet another debate about Zionism,
let me suggest it is but it is also much more. It is, for one thing, a debate
about a leftism that has never matured an inch beyond Leninist conceptions of history.
According to these, Israel is a "colonial settler state." That's the
sort of nonsense Abbas revisits when he talks about imperial designs on the
Levant that Zionism Europe a vehicle to fulfill.

In his apology for this dreck Abbas did admit that nothing
worse than the Holocaust had ever happened, ever, so far as crimes against
humanity go.

Holocaust on the one hand, worst crime ever, Zionism as handy
imperialist conspiracy on the other.

Sense the disconnect?

I'm sure Abbas, an octogenarian, gets splitting headaches
about this. Maybe. Or doesn't. Assuming a head. Same should be said of the left
head. Or lack thereof.

But I want to move on, if only slightly, from the particular
brain ache about Zionism and the Holocaust.

I want to say something ++ about the emptiness of Zionism, its
failure, allure, insufficiency, void.

I support the state of Israel. Therefore, in the most basic
sense, I am a Zionist. But Israel does not satisfy my sense of Jewish nationalism.
Nor can it. Nor can it speak for or protect me and the likes of me outside its
borders.

I support English labor initiatives much as I can, or the
equivalents in the United States, but I support even more those Jewish voters
in London who said, no you can't run over us.

Thursday, May 3, 2018

Yeah, I read The Times. and here's the scariest bit I came
upon in today's paper (5/3/18):

Even as Mr. Netanyahu was speaking [announcing reasons, fraudulent
even by the lights of his own highly sophisticated military, for abrogating the
nuclear treaty with Iran] his coalition in Parliament was pushing through a
bill that would shift the power to go to war or carry out a military operation
from the full cabinet to the smaller security cabinet — and, under “extreme
circumstances,” allow the prime minister and defense minister alone to order
such action.

This is scary. Even if the Israeli political system will put
enough blockades in the way.

And yet, one must ask, what is it with Netanyahu, as in WTF?
Such a monster, warmonger?